The Rippling Coliseum That Is My Mind

In a Cathedral with Judas, sharing a single crystal goblet filled with the wine of our blood; we sit side by side in silence, each of us pontificating, lost in our memories.

Chopin speaks to me, Nocturne in E Minor as always. The music flows through me like knives and roses yet I am unable to stop my mind from running away from me into the ethereally charged pain. “The agony is your destiny to freedom,” Morpheus murmurs softly. Judas’s eyes remain sealed, he is breathing deeply, his chest almost heaving. A single tear drops from his left eye and he dies. I am alone with the chalk white corpse of Judas, and he begins to disintegrate, flashes of light and fire, and I am left with smoke in the shape of his face resembling a hologram of ashes.

Ashes to ashes, Dust to Dust. Rapturous Death, Rapturous Love.

This empty place in my heart as empty as this Cathedral, in Rome, Latin drenching the walls of my soul. I speak nothing but my words and I rarely speak those, I write them on the papyrus in my hunger machines. There is nothing pure; there never was; all that remains are the flame & blood…

Judas’s tremulous smoke kneels and slowly places his face on the ground as though in deep prayer.

I am ignorant of his desires in regard to his spiritual cataclysm’s. They are his alone as are mine. Not our.

Chopin continues to whisper, slower, slower, slower until I find myself in a state of utter feebleness inside the valvular structure of my heart.

Is this the hour of my spiritual suicide, inevitable as it is, to take place?

I stumble out the gate into the door of my home. There are small cross shaped diamonds laying all over my sheets like minuscule daggers or stars. I devour them all in time to the great pianist speaking through me. My eyes tingle and lower, sinking into my cheeks like tear drops into a great, cold, heaving ocean of my smiles. I vomit the diamonds. I immediately devour them again.

There is no Leviathan that can be destroyed as there is all men that are destroyed. I feel the rocks shining blindly in my stomach and esophagus and I am in ecstasy, the approaching Leviathan, I realize, feeding me the Chopin and the diamonds. I vomit them and gather them with my fingers one by one and one by one I drink them down like champagne, bleeding tissue and cartilage resting in the pools of vomit.

The singing Leviathan inching closer by the moment. Judas’s face reappears and laughs hysterically for exactly 3 moments. I weep such pain, clutch my stomach, and hold the rocks in place. The Leviathan hears my struggle and it is indifferently continuing the beauty and the cruelty of Nocturne, now in B Flat Minor. He swings his massive incantation toward me and the ground of my home begins to shake and moan beneath me. A single third eye sheds a tear of blood from the ceiling onto my papyrus on my desk next to the bed where I lie, still.

Judas’s face reappears and disappears, disappears and reappears; he is laughing in vile hysteria at me, now. I cannot look. Ashes rise from the smoke of the burning papyrus, the plague of the blood of the Angel Gabriel, bringer of light and I cut my arm with my one diamond I am unable to swallow and try to extinguish the quarto but it continues burning, a hot white and red alternating light emanating from its flames. My ribs crack. The pianist.

The Leviathan rises up from the soil into the darkened room and devours my works, “The Great Hell & Of Man We Nought Know,” his grotesque tongue a slithering sword gathering my life’s toil. In gruesome countenance the monster contorts his face into what appears to be utter happiness.

I reach for the Goblet but Leviathan swallows it with his flailing tongue, regurgitates momentarily, spits the glass into my mind. The singular balance from the Cathedral is so far away.

I start to move off the bed slowly, my left eye on the monster, my right iris directed at the black door before me and I rise and leap off the sheets into the door, crashing through it injecting splinters into my timeless, precarious finality that is continuing on like a Maoist induced Cambodian death march led by brother number two followed by Pol Pot and all the photographed slaves of S-21-Tuol Sleng political holocaustical department of just fish.

I leave the Leviathan but he does not leave me, he roars and deafens me with Chopin, F Major. I cannot hear or see; the door has led to a door the same in appearance and I hurl my blinded soul and heartless body through it collecting more petrified splinters into my neck.

There is another black door.

And another.

And another.

Leviathan has blinded me and I am in utter silence before the door of my sin, blood pooling in my eyes. My sense of direction has increased in proportion to the loss of my other senses. I sneer madly and crash through the next door into a white feathered dungeon’s fireplace, where I coil myself up, my left leg severed. I hide, like Anne Franke opposing Helen Keller, in the figurative; I try to feel around my owned confinement but all I feel are warm-snow-like feathers drifting around my torso like the sacred dust of a pagan deity.

I snarl and sob simultaneously and attempt to scream, “The great paradox is upon Rome!” but I am unable to scream the profound vérité truth as I have now been made mute as Leviathan has placed the piano into my teeth. A sliver of my quarto I slaved over, hunched, written on the crackling papyrus, it shivers down the chimney. I only feel it with my pinky.

A great and thunderous crashing sound above.

I am buried in my own slavery; I reach out for God as I begin to suffocate but only Judas appears, crying bloody tears into the ash I am drowning within.

I am buried with Judas.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust; Raptures to Raptures, Lust to Lust.

The great void yawns me in.

I am swallowed.

Spiritual half-vicarious suicide; for I die for Judas, joyously. God shakes his head in shame and I scream up at the blackness bellowing laughter as I fall,